Microsoft Research Singapore Marks First Year of AI

Microsoft Research Asia – Singapore (MSRA – Singapore) has marked its first year of operation since opening on July 24, 2025. As Microsoft’s first research lab in Southeast Asia, the facility builds on over two decades of regional collaboration, including more than 75 research projects with Singaporean institutions since 2004. Dr. Lidong Zhou, managing director of MSRA, noted that the lab acts as "a bridge connecting Microsoft’s frontier AI research" with Singapore's ecosystem. In its inaugural year, the lab launched nine new projects with the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Nanyang Technological University (NTU).

A core pillar of the lab's work is its five-year Framework Research Agreement with NUS, signed in 2025. This collaboration has already yielded projects like a unified multimodal AI for healthcare developed by NUS Assistant Professor Mike Shou and MSRA’s Xinxing Xu. Additionally, NUS Assistant Professor Yang You and MSRA’s Furu Wei are researching systems foundations for diffusion-based language models. The lab also works with the Singapore Economic Development Board (EDB), which co-hosted an Executive Roundtable on AI in Logistics and Transportation in February 2026 with more than 10 regional industry leaders.

The lab’s talent initiatives include the Industrial Postgraduate Programme (IPP) and the Stars of Tomorrow Internship Program, which has engaged over 90 local students. Under joint supervision, IPP student Qiming Huang developed RobotSeg, a foundation model for robot segmentation, which was selected for an oral presentation at CVPR 2026. Furthermore, the NUS-MSRA AI Summer School has trained more than 300 students since 2025, and 13 Singapore-based students have received the prestigious Microsoft Research Asia Fellowship.

For AI practitioners and developers in Southeast Asia, MSRA’s localized presence bridges the gap between foundational theory and regional application. By tailoring multimodal models and agentic systems to local healthcare and logistics contexts, the lab provides practitioners with robust, domain-specific frameworks. This collaborative ecosystem ensures that emerging research, such as verifiable machine learning systems, is rapidly translated into practical, trustworthy tools for regional industries.